Now you don't even have to try to work to get on welfare

This is so sad. We've got to get people OFF welfare, not add more and more freeloaders to the rolls! What part of WE ARE BANKRUPT does the President not understand????

RUSH: Barack Obama yesterday or the day before maybe (the days run together) gutted warfare reform. He just wrote it out of existence. He wrote out the work requirements for welfare. It's gone, with an executive command to Health and Human Services, Department of Labor, and whatever departments. BREAK TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Yesterday the Obama administration issued a new directive stating that the traditional work requirements of the new welfare reform law back in 1996, those new work requirements, can be waived or overridden by a legal device called a waiver authority under the Social Security law. Welfare reform has been gutted, ladies and gentlemen. That's right. While everybody's worried about who the vice presidential nominee is gonna be and whether or not the nominee's pro-life, pro-choice, pro-Martian, everybody is worried about whether Mitt Romney left Bain Capital in 1999 or 1998 or 2001, Barack Obama continues his systematic dismantling of the private sector economy of the United States of America. After this move, if anybody thinks that the attack on the way this country was founded is simply accidental, you can't. This is from the Heritage Foundation, Robert Rector, who has been at Heritage probably longer than Obama's been alive. Bob Rector. He's done some of the best work on poverty in this country as compared to poverty around the world. If you have taken my advice and become a Heritage member, you need to search and absorb some of the work of Bob Rector, R-e-c-t-o-r. Kiki Bradley also helped put together this report: "Obama Guts Welfare Reform." It's from yesterday. "The Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) released an official policy directive rewriting the welfare reform law of 1996." The welfare reform law of 1996 was put together in Congress, where all laws are put together. Bill Clinton vetoed it two or three times. Finally, he signed it as part of his need to get reelected in 1996. And when he signed it, finally, a bunch of Democrats, led by the Reverend Jackson, demanded that he change it after the election. But he didn't. It was left intact. It has been working. It requires work or an attempt to work in order to qualify for welfare payments. "The new policy guts the federal work requirements that were the foundation of the reform law. The Obama directive bludgeons the letter and intent of the actual reform legislation. Welfare reform replaced the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children." That was the program where a mother got paid for every child she had, whether the husband was around or not. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred the husband wasn't around. The federal government became the husband and the provider. It became profitable to have babies and it was a program out of control. Welfare reform fixed it, and AFDC became welfare reform. The actual name of the welfare reform law is Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. TANF is the acronym.

"The underlying concept of welfare reform was that able-bodied adults should be required to work or prepare for work as a condition of receiving welfare aid. The welfare reform law is often characterized as simply giving state governments more flexibility in operating welfare programs. This is a serious misunderstanding. While new law (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996) did grant states more flexibility in some respects, the core of the act was the creation of rigorous new federal work standards that state governments were required to implement.

"The welfare reform law was very successful. In the four decades prior to welfare reform, the welfare caseload never experienced a significant decline. But, in the four years after welfare reform, the caseload dropped by nearly half." It worked. Half of people on welfare, AFDC, which then became TANF, dropped out of the program. Employment surged. You had to find work to stay on welfare. You had to try to find work to stay on welfare. You had to work, and it worked. Employment surged. "Child poverty," Rector's special area of expertise, "child poverty among affected groups plummeted. The driving force behind these improvements was the rigorous new federal work requirements contained in the TANF law."

Half of the welfare caseload dropped in four years. It worked. Obama can't abide that. We don't want people off of welfare in this regime. We don't want people leaving the welfare rolls. Those are voters that are getting away. We want more people in the welfare rolls. We're gonna advertise food stamps. We're gonna have food stamp parties, and I'm gonna do all this while asking everybody to worry about what Mitt Romney's doing with his money.

So how did Obama do this? What was the trick? "The Obama Administration issued a new directive stating that the traditional TANF work requirements can be waived or overridden by a legal device called the section 1115 waiver authority under the Social Security law (42 U.S.C. 1315). Section 1115 states that 'the Secretary may waive compliance with any of the requirements' of specified parts of various laws. But this is not an open-ended authority: Any provision of law that can be waived under section 1115 must be listed in section 1115 itself. The work provisions of the TANF program are contained in section 407 (entitled, appropriately, 'mandatory work requirements'). Critically, this section, as well as most other TANF requirements, are deliberately not listed in section 1115; they are not waiveable."